Peritoneal Dialysis (PD), including Automated Peritoneal Dialysis (APD) and Continuous Ambulatory Peritoneal Dialysis (CAPD), is a dialysis treatment that can be performed at home, either by a patient alone or with a care-giver. PD differs from Hemodialysis (HD) in that blood is not removed from the body and passed through a dialyzer, but rather a catheter is placed in the peritoneal cavity and dialysate introduced directly into the peritoneal cavity. Blood is cleaned inside the patient using the patient's own peritoneum as a type of dialysis membrane.
The effectiveness of peritoneal dialysis therapy depends on several factors, unique to specific patients. Known systems do not provide any mechanism for optimizing a peritoneal dialysate prescription based on characteristics of peritoneal dialysate filtrate removed from a patient. Solute concentrations, dwell times, cycle number, and other parameters affecting the patient during therapy cannot be controlled with known systems. Further, known systems do not provide any mechanism of adjusting solute concentrations in the dialysate to specific values based on the needs of the patient, and instead only allow a small number of peritoneal dialysate compositions to be used.
Hence, there is a need for systems and methods that can sample peritoneal dialysate filtrate from a patient and determine whether adjustments to a peritoneal dialysate prescription should be made. There is also a need for systems and methods to generate peritoneal dialysate in accordance with any adjusted dialysate prescription. The need includes providing a personalized peritoneal dialysis therapy based on the peritoneal dialysate generated in accordance with the adjusted dialysate prescription.